In 1902, Remington advertised its breakthrough appliance — the first commercial typewriter — with the following slogan: “To save time is to lengthen life.”
It’s a powerful phrase, and for years, Richard Polt thought it was true. Polt is a typewriter collector, but he’s also a professor of philosophy. Eventually, he came to the following realization: “The more time you save, the more time you waste, because you’re doing things that are only a means to an end.”
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In seventh grade, my history teacher asked if anyone knew what the huge, fancy, painting-like carpets covering the walls of the Palace of Versailles were called. His question was met with silence and puzzled faces.
Eventually, I raised my hand and said: “Gobelin.” My teacher was thrilled. So was my neighbor. “Ooooh, go-be-liiiiin, Mr. I-know-everything.” The class erupted in laughter.
There’s something to be said here about shaming intellectuals and about a system in which being fun is cooler than being smart, but at 13 I was oblivious to both of those things — so I too erupted in laughter. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, right?
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Water is balance. That’s why Bruce Lee’s “Be Water” analogy is popular to this day. His metaphor captures the balance we all need in our lives.
Water doesn’t look left or right. It just makes its way however it can. It adapts, but it always perseveres. Even at rest, water still slowly eats away at its surroundings. In Striking Thoughts, Lee expanded on the short recorded clip:
Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
Water is a slow judge. It asks: “What shape do I need to be?” It conforms to whatever it’s in touch with, one drop at a time. However, you can only ask that question if you come to any situation with an empty mind.
Empty your mind. Be formless. Shapeless. Like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow, or it can crash.
Despite having no form on its own, despite being infinitely soft, water is one of, if not the strongest element on earth. It can trickle, it can flow, or it can rage. If water drops on a stone long enough, it’ll hollow it out. If water forms a wave the size of a skyscraper, it can crush an entire ship. Water does whatever it needs to do to keep moving forward.
Water may seem to move in contradiction, even uphill, but it chooses any way open to it so that it may reach the sea. It may flow swiftly or it may flow slowly, but its purpose is inexorable, its destiny sure. Be water, my friend.
Thanks to its never-ending balancing act, water always finds its way back home. Sooner or later, it will reach the sea. You too should keep flowing. Have plans, but don’t force them on life.
Life is unpredictable. Sometimes, it throws stones in your way. Sometimes, a new door opens up. When you’re water, you’re ready for either one of the two. Whatever happens tomorrow, you’ll adapt.
When the universe says “Yes,” go. Flow downhill. Move fast. Leap. Ride the momentum, take the opportunity, and make the most of your advantage.
When the universe says “No,” listen. Take a different path. Adjust. Persist slowly instead of failing spectacularly.
When a crisis hits, summon your strength. Form a towering wave. And when the sea is calm, enjoy the cruise and take in the view.
When you’re water, you’re always exactly where you’re meant to be.
Be water, my friend.
When he lived in Santa Monica, Derek Sivers found the perfect bike path: A 15-mile round trip along the ocean with almost zero traffic. In his afternoons, he’d get on his bike and race full speed ahead. On average, the trip took him 43 minutes to complete.
After several months of arriving with a red face, a sweaty head, and feeling completely exhausted, Derek decided to take it easy for once. He looked at the scenery. He saw some dolphins. He casually pedaled along. It took him 45 minutes.
At first, Derek couldn’t believe it, but he double-checked his numbers, and, sure enough, he achieved 96% of the result with 50% of the effort. Reflecting on the experience, he writes:
When I notice that I’m all stressed out about something or driving myself to exhaustion, I remember that bike ride and try dialing back my effort by 50%. It’s been amazing how often everything gets done just as well and just as fast, with what feels like half the effort.
A few years ago, my Dad and I used to do something similar: We raced home in our cars. It’s about five miles from the city to the suburbs, and we too used to speed, catch yellow traffic lights, and overtake anyone in our way.
One day, we did the math: If you go 50% over the limit on such a short trip, you’ll save about one minute. We’ve been cruising ever since.
Life is like that a lot. You go all out to be 50% faster, better, stronger, only to arrive one day early at the finish line.
It’s easy to get caught up the everyday hustle. “Let me queue in the other line.” “I can cut a corner here.” “Maybe, I can get them to approve my application faster.” Switching lanes often feels efficient in the moment but won’t make a big difference in the end.
This applies to our daily to-do lists as much as it applies to our biggest goals. If you get the report one day sooner, the company can go public one day earlier — but all that means is that its shares will trade one day extra. On a 10-year-timeline, who cares about that day? No one.
You can stay up till 2 AM and post one extra article. But in your five-year-plan of becoming a writer, does it really matter? Sometimes, it will. Most of the time, however, it won’t. But if you don’t get enough sleep, you can’t see through your five-year-plan. That part always matters.
You can race to your friend’s BBQ and honk and yell at every other driver along the way. Or, you can drive half as fast and still get there on time.
You’d arrive relaxed, happy, and in a positive state of mind. You wouldn’t be exhausted from all the stress that took so much from your mind but added so little to your outcome. This is what Derek learned from his frantic bike rides:
Half of my effort wasn’t effort at all, but just unnecessary stress that made me feel like I was doing my best.
Sometimes, doing your best means having nothing left to give. Usually, it doesn’t. More often than not, feeling completely spent is a sign that you wasted most of your energy.
Energy is precious. Conserve it. Direct it efficiently. Take pride in doing your best in a way that lets you do your best again tomorrow. Life is short. Enjoy it. Don’t burn through it too quickly. Be content with the 96%.
After all, what good are two extra minutes if you can’t use them to gaze at the sea?
All relationship problems are communication problems.
Tim says: “The window is open.”
Maya says: “I’m not your butler.”
Whoa! How did such a small interaction go so wrong? Tim said just four words, but, immediately, his girlfriend felt offended. Sadly, exchanges like this happen millions of times every single day. I’m sure you’ve had one.
Maybe, Tim just thought out loud as he noticed the window being open. Maybe, he wanted Maya to notice the birds singing outside or tell her that he opened it for a reason. Or, he really did want Maya to close the window.
Unfortunately, Maya responded so fast that she didn’t have time to consider all these options. Her heuristic-driven brain jumped to one conclusion when it should have thought about many.
We all do this. We speak before we think, and we damage our relationships in the process. Today, Maya snubs Tim. Tomorrow, Tim cuts Maya off. And the day after tomorrow, Tim and Maya break up. How sad and unnecessary.
If Tim and Maya had taken some time to talk about how they communicate, they might still be together. This is called meta-communication, and it makes perfect sense: If all relationship problems are communication problems, improving your communication will make most of your problems go away.
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If you want to learn the piano, press one key today.
If you want to write a book, write one paragraph today.
If you want a better relationship, make one confession today.
Whatever you do, don’t wait. Don’t wait for tomorrow. Not again. Not now. It’s time. Take the gloves off. This is it. One life, one time. No do overs. Don’t wait.
If you want a new job, learn one new thing today.
If you want a big money cushion, save $1 today.
If you want to feel inspired, study one inspiring person today.
Objects can’t move without momentum. You have to be in motion to stay in motion. It doesn’t matter how small — it only matters that it’s there.
Imperceivable growth now brings exponential growth later. You have to trust the imperceivable. Do the small things first. Do what feels ridiculous. You must crawl before you can run — but you must not wait.
If you want to run a marathon, run for ten minutes today.
If you want to be a chef, make scrambled eggs today.
If you want to teach children, help one child today.
Urgency isn’t coming. No one will kick your butt in gear. Urgency isn’t the postman. It’s not reliable. It won’t show up each day at 3. But if you’re already checking the door, you might as well go for a run. You show up at 3.
You must be the one to bring the urgency. You must understand that life is finite. You have to allow for that to click. And you have to do that today.
If you want to start a business, send one email today.
If you want to make friends, ask one person to have coffee today.
If you want to be a thought leader, post one idea today.
Regret is a sneaky bastard. Always late to the party. When regret shows up, it’s time to go home. Too late already. “Nothing to see here folks, just another human on a trip down misery lane.” Ugh. You again. Regret. Asshole.
If you want to read a book, read one page today.
If you want to paint a mountain, make one stroke today.
If you want to bury the hatchet, call one relative today.
The river of time carries all of us away. Redemption makes for a nice story, but it’s not guaranteed. The only promise you have is today. Don’t wait. Use today.
If you want to find freedom, choose peace of mind today.
If you want to make history, take a stand today.
If you want to be a better human, do one thing differently today.
Whatever you do, don’t wait. Don’t wait for tomorrow. Not again. Don’t wait.
Your parents aren’t coming to save you. They’ve done that often enough. Or maybe never at all. Either way, they’re not coming now. You’re all grown. Maybe not grown up, but grown. They’ve got their own stuff to take care of.
Your best friend isn’t coming to save you. He’ll always love you, but he’s knee deep in the same shit you’re in. Work. Love. Health. Staying sane. You know, the usual. You should check in with him some time. But don’t expect him to save you.
Your boss is not coming to save you. Your boss is trying to cover her ass right now. She’s afraid she might get fired. She’s fighting hard to keep everyone on the team. She’s worried about you, but she has no time to save you.
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There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who do too little to accomplish their dreams and those who do too much.
Usually, self-help talks to the former. “Your dreams are urgent! Who knows how long you’ll have? Don’t wait! Start now! Go, go, go!”
I know because I have written many of those posts. I wrote these articles because “Go, go, go!” was the message I needed to hear to finally start on my own journey.
It took me 23 years to realize no one was coming to save me. That I had to build what I wanted with my own hands. That only I could give meaning to my life.
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Here’s some simple math: If you type 30 words per minute, then a 300-word email will take you 10 minutes to write. But if you can type twice as fast, you can crank it out in five. That’s a lot of minutes saved if you write a lot of emails — or do anything else that requires you to type words on a screen.
With all the productivity hacks out there for managing your time — simplifying your inbox, time blocking, optimizing your meetings — typing faster seems like the obvious, low-hanging fruit. But it’s fruit that many people aren’t reaching for. As the MIT Tech Review has noted, touch typing has fallen out of favor and many schools are no longer teaching it. You probably type at the same speed that you did when you were in high school, and you assume that it’s working out for you just fine.
Trust me, it’s not. Your slowness is costing you. Dearly. You just never realized it. You don’t see the person at the other end of your email typing at twice your speed and therefore getting more done. But that’s what’s happening. When it comes to small tasks at work, speed matters.
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Unconditional love is the only true love there is.
But, to be honest, I don’t really know what ‘unconditional’ means. I don’t think many of us do.
We know what’s not unconditional love.
Expecting someone else to fulfill your needs is not unconditional love. Neither is doing them favors if those favors are attached to that same expectation. Even hoping your partner will want all the same things you do isn’t unconditional love. That’s just delusion.
Blind trust is not unconditional love. When you see your girlfriend walking right into a trap, you must call her out on it. False pride isn’t unconditional love. Sometimes, our loved ones screw up. If your boyfriend is on the wrong side of an argument, tell him why and help him see.
But what is unconditional love? Here are some ideas.
Will Smith’s house cost some $42 million and took seven years to build. Everything is custom-made, from the recording studio to the basketball court, and it looks like a Moroccan-style wonderland. The house is called “Her Lake” because Will dedicated the Herculean feat to his wife, Jada — or so he thought.
Dissecting the misunderstanding, Will remembers being devastated when he realized that, actually, he built the house for himself. Having grown up in an abusive household, a perpetual theme park mansion where everyone is happy 24/7 had somehow crept into his picture of an ideal family — and it didn’t matter whether Jada wanted the same or not.
Today, Will uses a little acronym to not repeat this same mistake: L.U.V. — Listen, Understand, Validate.
“There is nothing that feels better to a human being than to feel understood. The mission is to thoroughly and completely understand what the person is saying.”
In order to understand, we first have to listen. That’s hard when you’re just waiting to get out something you want to say. You have to “quiet your own mind, your thoughts, needs, and desires” so you can pay true attention, Will says. Then, make sure your judgments are correct by repeating — and validating — some of what your partner has just entrusted you with.
You won’t always succeed in understanding others, but you can always make the effort — regardless of the final outcome.
Listen, understand, validate. That’s unconditional love.
Someone once asked a Navy SEAL instructor who makes it through the training for the most elite combat unit in the world. This was his response: “There’s no certain kind of person, but all the guys who make it, when they are physically and emotionally spent and have nothing left to give, somehow, they find the energy to help the guy next to them.”
We think of war as the polar opposite of love and, in many ways, it is. Ironically, being a good soldier — someone destined to fight — is not about being tough, smart, or fast. It’s about loving the person next to you and helping them succeed. As he recounts this story, Simon Sinek says:
“It’ll be the single most valuable thing you ever learn in your entire life: To accept help when it’s offered and to ask for it when you know that you can’t do it.”
Of course, to receive love when you really need it, you must have offered it to others before. It’s a circle. We all must take care of each other.
“The minute you say, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m stuck, I’m scared, I don’t think I can do this,’ you will find that lots of people who love you will rush in and take care of you, but that’ll only happen if you learn to take care of them first.”
The primary reason to help someone shouldn’t be that they need it but that you can. After you cover your own basic needs, the easiest way to feel love is to offer it to someone in the form of mental, physical, emotional, or material support. It doesn’t have to be big. You don’t have to sacrifice yourself. Take a small step out of your way so someone else can take a larger one on theirs.
Will Smith agrees:
“At its core, I think love is help. Everybody is having a hard time. I think love is a deep desire for our loved ones’ growth, blossoming, and all around well-being.”
Look left. Look right. Who’s standing next to you? Those are the people who need your love right now. They deserve it as much as anyone. Who knows? Soon, you might be the one in need, and they too will give you a hand.
Love is help — and true help is unconditional love.
I saw Michael Bublé in concert once. After the first song, he told all 10,000 of us the following: “You know, I used to be so nervous giving shows like this. What if I forget the lyrics? What if I trip and fall? But when you go through something traumatizing, you realize: That shit doesn’t matter at all.”
At three years old, Michael’s son got cancer. He survived, but for a few years, Michael’s life was a living hell. What do you do when your child is about to die? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Except, hopefully, find acceptance, and then take life one day at a time. That’s what Michael did.
Today, Michael carries that same acceptance wherever he goes. Whether it’s talking about his trauma, a confession on a talk show, or singing in front of 10,000 fans, the man is as authentic as they come. He radiates love at every turn, carrying a sort of lightness — a seeming disregard almost — for whatever happens next, because he knows he can accept it and handle life as it unfolds.
Acceptance is not victimhood. It’s registering the status quo in its totality, no matter how pretty or ugly it might be, and then dealing with it head on. It’s the Stoic skill of differentiating between what we control and what we don’t, and then doing the best we can about the former while ignoring the latter.
This also applies to our relationships. In Me Before You, a father tells his daughter over a breakup: “You can’t change who people are.” She asks, “Then what can you do?” “You love them.” Like us, our friends, families, and partners will never be perfect — and they definitely won’t be exactly who we want them to be — but that’s not the point. The point is to love them.
Will Smith shares a great analogy:
“I think that the real paradigm for love is ‘Gardener-Flower.’ The relationship that a gardener has with a flower is the gardener wants the flower to be what the flower is designed to be, not what the gardener wants the flower to be.”
How can you support your loved ones in who they truly aspire to become? That’s the question. It’s not about tolerating every flaw or never pointing out when they’re wrong, it’s about accepting them for who they are at their core.
Accept people without giving up on them. That’s unconditional love.
Understand, help, accept. These are actions. Not concepts. Not feelings. Actions. If true love sums up these activities, then maybe love itself is also something we do rather than something we feel. A verb much more so than a noun.
That’s the problem with definitions: If we don’t come up with our own, we’ll passively adopt whatever society hands us. In love, these cultural definitions are especially messy. It’s a broad word, and it subsumes a thousand different things, from the expensive chocolates on Valentine’s Day to butterflies in your stomach to the connection between a son and his long-estranged father.
It’s easy to get confused, to lose yourself in the abstractions and emotions, and to forget that the verb — the action of loving — is the part that matters. This dichotomy of verb and noun torpedoes our understanding of love so much that, often, we go about the whole thing the wrong way.
We end up so hell-bent on seeking love outside ourselves, on finding the noun — the feeling — in another person, that we forget we hold power over the verb at all times — and that exercising this power starts with loving ourselves.
In that sense, love is a choice. It requires no one’s presence but our own, and we can choose it in all circumstances. We can direct it inward and outward, and, at the end of it all, our actions will show how much we really chose to love. The feelings and symbols may come and may go. Love anyway.
Love is a verb. Choosing to love, over and over again, is unconditional love.
In all the above, there is an element of sacrifice. When we listen to someone, we can’t speak. When we help someone, we might slow our own progress. Acceptance can feel like giving up. And when we choose to do one thing, it means not choosing another.
Going back to the gardener-flower analogy, Will Smith says:
“You want the flower to bloom and to blossom and to become what it wants to be. You want it to become what God designed it to be. You’re not demanding that it become what you need it to be for your ego. Anything other than all of your gifts wide open, giving and nourishing this flower into their greatness, is not love.”
When you compromise out of love, you don’t feel like you’re losing something. You see agreement as a win-win. You gain from it.
Like Will said: Everyone is having a hard time. No one’s life is free of problems. In fact, it consists entirely of making tradeoffs. As such, the ability to compromise is a strength, not a weakness. We need flexibility.
Most of the time, the only way forward together is one neither party would have chosen on their own. When you’re alone, a narrow road might suffice. When you’re together, you need a path wide enough for everybody. Finding and choosing this path is an act of love.
Love is compromise without the loss. Flexibility is unconditional love.